Sullying the Image

 

Mediocrity.

Good, comfortable, mediocrity.

No one rises above anyone else. No one keeps score in case someone might show themselves more able, more bold, than someone else. We are not only all equal in our dignity and humanity but we are all the same in our abilities and our courage. There are no heroes. There are no innate leaders. We are not challenged. We are satisfied.

Bah. 

Even Jesus knew that a society founded on mediocrity doesn't work. 

"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." -Rev 3: 15-16

I am often mocked for finding truth in philosopher (and fierce capitalist) Ayn Rand, but sometimes, I just can't help it. Some of what she has to say rings true.

We don't want any great men. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept, and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop incentive to improvement, to perfection. 

This is why Jesus spits the mediocre out of His mouth. He wants excellence. He made us for perfection.

"Be ye perfect, like my heavenly Father is perfect." - Matthew 5:48

Perfect. And He's not kidding.

We may forget that we were made in God's image, but He hasn't. He did it and we are expected to live up to it. That means to be the best we can be, the most Christ-like, the most holy. We are to strive, not slump into perpetual, amused relaxation. 

There's a reaon for this.

There will always be venal men or women who will exploit our ennui. They will take advantage of our contentedness with the average and rise above, not with ability or nobility but with shrewdness, greed, and calculated corruption. Look around. We already live, at least partially, in this world. Do you wonder why?  Look in the mirror.

To what extent have you been given a vision of a life, a community, that offered something more than vanilla and done little to work toward it?

When have you been satisfied not with your best, but with just good enough?

To what extent have you traded the hours of your life to being amused?

Even the church can forget that, although we are taught to be the servant of one another, that assumes that everyone involved understands the principle of godly service. When some don't, we don't have a community of mutual service, but of servants and masters. Instead of all of us serving God, we end up serving someone who has no God. We are not to yield our godly image to them. We are not to forsake our holiness or our excellence to the service of those who dominate and destroy. 

We are responsible for preserving what we've been given and this is done one soul at a time. It is done starting with you.

image: istock

Who's Dying When We Kill Time?

 

"One cannot kill time without injuring eternity." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This is where I get to air a pet peeve.

I get really edgy when someone tells me they are doing something because it "takes up the time" or because it "makes the time pass".

  Are you kidding me?

I am 74 years old and the one single resource I have in shortest supply is time. I weigh almost everything I do in terms of whether it is worth the time I'm allowing it. Should I read this book? Not if it doesn't do enough for me to be worth the slice of my dwindling life I have to allot it. Should I take this trip? Not if all it does is relieve a state of boredom that I shouldn't be subject to anyway. If I'm bored, it isn't because I'm not enough amused. It's because I'm not enough interested or curious.

Henry David was right. 

Life is the supreme gift. Just the privilege of being alive. Acknowledging this gift means that every moment must be lived, really felt and experienced and noted as it passes. Just being aware of our surroundings, as he was, is enough to fill us with wonder. The change of seasons. The chance to laugh with someone. To watch something grow. To smell fresh ground spices or fresh peaches hot coffee or wet paint. To feel our muscles move when we dig a hole or dance or embrace someone we love.  

Once, when I was talking to my daughter-in-law, Gina, trying to understand why she kept such a seemingly frantic schedule for herself and her family, she just shrugged and told me, "These days won't last forever and I don't want to miss a thing." In essence, she was telling me that she doesn't want just to witness her life pass. She wants to live it.

The specific intention to live makes amusement a thief.

Eternity is the tree of life that grows from the seed of a moment. Moments do not exist as separate entities but as contracted wholes, not strung one to another but discrete entireties. If we don't look out, we will run out of the time we're trying so hard to make pass. And then, it is not only time we run out of, but all of life and we will be left wondering where it's gone.

image: Illimilab

Marketing God: What Separation Wrought in the Church

 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

 The first part of the first amendment of the Constitution, written at a time when a state-proclaimed and -authorized religion was the order of the day and citizens could be prosecuted for practicing any other. Look carefully. It was not designed to protect the state from religion, but religion from the state.

And when the First Amendment put up the wall between church and state, something else happened. Religion became a new marketplace. New faith systems, and splinters from those faith systems, sprung up from disgruntled and fractionalized believers, creating a landscape of hundreds - literally hundreds - of different denominations. In the process, they made themselves compete for believers in a way not much different from the way competing advertisements praise their laundry soaps or SUVs. 

A cynic might shake their head and muse that, of course their mandate is to preach the gospel to all the world - they need to fill their pews and increase the target pool, though that is not likely to be their main motive. After all, the command to preach is part of the gospel and assuming it wasn't one of those add-ons that are uprooted from time to time, needs to be taken seriously from a viewpoint beyond marketing. However...however....

The result of abolishment of a national religion cannot be denied. We have churches that unabashedly appeal to those who demand entertainment and an uplifting, but often shallow, Sunday morning experience. We have religions based on doctrine or atmosphere rather than an experience of God. We have parishioners who stay in a church only so long as they are not challenged or offended, then readily migrate to the next one. We have every kind of worship practice from rock bands and strobe lights to snake charmers and Bible thumpers. 

It's hard to look at the total landscape of divisive faith flavors and not wonder what in the world this has to do with the Jesus they (or at least some of them) claim to follow, the Jesus of the sermon on the mount, the Jesus who had no church building, or anywhere to lay His head, and apparently needed none to effectively follow His Father. 

image: religious freedom/Old Life

The Sun is Always Rising

 

I took this photo from the middle aisle of a 787 on the way to Rome. I'd been tracking our progress: Chicago, Michigan, Toronto, Montreal, Nova Scotia, and then this. A brilliant full moon over what I knew was nothing but miles of ocean. A full moon that dazzled the eye of the plane window. A moon and nothing else but black sea below. 

But I knew the direction we were heading - the plane was flying to Rome - East, directly toward the rising sun. The moon wouldn't last long. We were leaving it behind.

It's always that way. The sun is always rising somewhere even when all looks black where I happen to be. Today, I get to catch up to it and hold it almost in my hands, possessing its power to turn the world bright and hot again. 

The way home, which I took in a little over three weeks, holds the same sun in stasis for hours, like it did for Joshua at Gibeon, daylight getting neither shorter or longer, until we land back in Chicago after ten hours in the air, but at almost the same time of day. 

The world is big and round and we could, if we wanted to stay in motion, experience a constant rising sun, a world of unextinguishable hope and possiblity. All we have to do is stay above the surface, gliding along it at the same pace as the globe is turning, and we never have to leave the brimming daylight behind. 

This is not a practical possibility, of course. We have to live a life somewhere in the process, but it can be a sustainable state of mind. We can, if we want, remember on our darkest days that the sun is still rising somewhere.

Defining Beauty

 I'm back in Florence.

This time, I took the whole family. There are nine of us - children,  one of the spouses, and all five granddaughters. And me. And this time, they made the itinerary. I told them to choose whatever fascinated them the most, hoping of course, they would see in it what I did: the grandeur of the Renaissance, the beauty of the art, and the history of politics, and the glory of God. And, of course, they did not. They chose very differently. A favorite winery, an interactive museum, a fortress town from a video game. Except  to see the David, no one wanted to go near an art gallery. Except for the Vatican and the  Pantheon, no one was interested in a church. 

It's not generational. It's more temperament, I think. Anyway, whatever it is, what brought me to Florence, and what keeps me going back, is the beauty. In art, in architecture, in science, in literature, in music, in the easy statliness of the ringing bells and the delightful lilt of Italian voices. It is all beautiful, and weaves an intoxicating web that catches me every time. I don't care much about the shopping or the gelato. I do care about the chanted rhytum of the nunc dimitis and the graceful swing of the bells in the campanile. I care about the marbeled eyes of a hero that seem to really see.

 I care about the medallion in the Piazza de la Signoria commemorating the hanging and burning of my favorite renegade monk, Girolamo Savanarola, 

I care about the  second floor garden that confined the imprisoned Galileo. I care about trying to figure out whether the Medicis, who largely financed Renaissance art, were benefactors or tyrants (they were probably both).

Lorenzo the Magnificent

For a long time, I couldn't figure out why I cared about any of this, then Simone Weil told me:

"Beauty is the incarnation of God in the world so all first rate art is inherently religious. Beauty is the real presence of God in matter."

That's exactly it. Beauty is how God shows Himself in the world. That's why we all recognize it in some form. God is in all of us, but the extent to which we seek out God determines the extent to which we are able to appreciate beauty. Beauty is part of our blood and bone in the same way as is oxygen or iron. There's a disease in Florence called Stendahl Syndrome - literally a malady characterised by dizziness or fevers- that is the result of too much beauty too fast. 

Beauty is the way we bridge the gap between God and man. Another piece of Weil wisdom: 

"Workers need poetry more than bread. Only religion - God - can be the source of this poetry. Its deprivation explains all forms of demoralization. Slavery is work without the light of eternity." 

And we are meant to bridge that gap. That, I think, is our main job as humans. That's the reason for the Eucharist - to apply the glory of God to material cells. 

"Manual work is time entering the body. Through work, man becomes matter like Christ in the Eucharist. "

Exactly. God gives us Himself. In bread. In art. In work. In beauty. 

Florence image: History Extra

David image: Fine Art America

Savanarola image: Alamy

Lorenzo image: Wikipedia

More Simone Weil: The Choice or: Nobody Ever Wins a War

 Every once in a while, not often mind you, a philosopher will say exactly the right thing in a short, concise form that really hits home. Today, Simone Weil did that for me.

"Whoever takes the sword will perish by the sword. Whoever lets go of it will perish by the cross."

Perfect.

Now let's do a little unpacking. The first part will be familiar to most people. Jesus said, "Whoever lives by the sword will die by the sword." We get that, well, in theory anyway. None of us do it. Not really. Everybody doesn't have a basement full of guns and ammo, but almost all of us are inclined to take God's justice ("Vengence is mine; I will repay, says the Lord" - Deut 32:35) into our own hands. Defending the defenseless, or even giving the bad guys what we think they have coming to them, seems like standard procedure. What else are we to do? 

Well, maybe take God at His word. Don't do it. Just don't. 

But what then, some of us wonder. What if no one stops the playground bully? He grows up to be Don Trump. What if no one stops Hitler? We all end up speaking German and clicking our heels. Or do we? I mean, no one really knows what would happen because no one has really tried. 

OK, a few have - Ghandi and Martin Luther King, for example, but things didn't go really well for them, did it? Minor victories, but nothing universally world-changing. And yet we admire them for what they did do. We know on some level that humans were not meant to exact violent revenge on one another. We were not meant to kill each other. Even in an effort to save innocent lives.

I've often wondered what would happen if we stopped taking revenge, or even defense, against a clearly evil enemy. First off, I think a lot of innocent people would die. A lot more even than in the fighting, perhaps. And at the end of it. we would still be stuck with a tyrant. That's not a happy ending, and it kind of proves Simone's second point. Once we lay down our weapons, we will die anyway, but by the cross, by sacrifice, without personally perpetrated, heart-destroying violence. It could happen, and I can't help feel there's some kind of salvation in it. After all, nobody wins a war. Ever. 

That's one thing about philosophers. They are some of the few people who admit everyone is going to die and really believe it. That's most of the cause of all their angst, but it does lead to a good, heavy dose of reality. We have to choose how we are going to live and in doing so, choose to a great degree how we are going to die. Because we will die, you know. We all will. And what will we be holding onto at the end? The self-righteous end of an .357 or  the cross? If my own death is going to count for something, let it speak of love.

Image: Sportsman Outdoor Superstore

What is Your Myth? - or - Living with Comfortable Fictions or Taking the Red Pill

 

We are obsessed with truth. We want it. From everyone.

But do we really? My late husband Dave had a reputation, not always a good one, for always telling the truth, a reputation that included unwelcome truths as well as welcome ones. Some folks thought this some kind of superpower, but some thought it anathema and issued warnings to anyone asking his opinion about anything. 

We spend so much of our time keeping company with pleasant truths, you see. Did you ever watch a Hallmark movie? Did you ever just want someone to tell you that, in spite of appearances, everything was going to be all right? I do. And I want to hear it because I know that often, it won't. Pleasant fiction.

John F. Kennedy has something to say about this when he gave an address at Yale University in 1962: 

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Oh, boy.

Myths. Preconcieved ideas. Cliches. Ideas that look like truths but feed vacant wishes. Premises that distort all of our possible futures with unlikely or impossible promises. Happily ever after endings.

That just isn't life. 

But we still color our outlooks with worldview. Here are a few examples:

• The Cleavers - the concept that there is or was a perfect family whose every member understood their role and lived contentedly in it, not making waves, and smiling when they took out the garbage.
• John Wayne - the idea that there is a simple world where black is black and white is white, where the good guys wore the right hat so you could recognize them and always win in the end without being scarred by the men they had to kill to get there.
• Consipracy Theory - the worldview that knows nothing is what it seems, that everyone you meet is out to get you, that no one can be trusted
• That Old Time Religion - A basic assurance that everything one needs to know about God is in the Bible, that church structure can be trusted implicitly, that nothing good can ever be added to or subtracted from what one hears in church on Sunday
• Blood is always thicker - the idea that family precludes every other relationship, that blood relationships inevitably tie people together no matter what, that even though people grow and change, family will love one and respect another forever.

Forgive me if these betray my own personal prejudices - they undoubtedly do - but I know folks who hold these worldviews and even though they are a source of consolation to them, a comfortable way of living in a confusing world, they are also a source of almost constant disillusionment because, well, because they're not true. 

No worldview always applies. No overall ideology works in every circumstance. They are myths. Myths that help us cope, to be sure, but myths nonetheless. 

The truth is that the world is a constantly changing combination of goods and evils shifting every moment, necessitating that we keep on our toes if we are going to stay within rails of reality. In short, we have to THINK. We have to go through the agony of figuring things out if we want to live in the real world. We have to take the red pill. It isn't always fun, but at least it's real. 

Image: The Telegraph